Padre Padrone

While there is no doubting the qualities of this film, it is a pity that more care has not been taken with the digital transfer. Colours are dull and desaturated and there are distracting digital artifacts in the darker scenes.

There is only one extra, but it is a good one, presented on an additional disc of its own. An episode taken from a series devoted to the principal players in Italian cinema, it is a comprehensive 84-minute interview with the Taviani brothers, conducted by their old friend Carlo Lizzani and covering their literary influences, their childhood, their early documentary work (“wannabe films” which they now largely repudiate), their later filmography, their attitude to critics and their working relationship ("We're accomplices - him and me against the whole world.").

We learn that Rossellini, whose Paisan (1946) first inspired the brothers to become filmmakers, would later, as President of the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, hand them their Palme d'Or for Padre Padrone, and that they personally saw none of the film's profits, even if it left them typecast for years as directors of family dysfunction. Not that this prevented them from going on to make their greatest masterpiece, the Pirandello adaptation Kaos (1984).